Top Project Management Software for Professional Services (2024)

Lucija Bakić

August 22, 2024

A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing a task management dashboard for a marketing and website project. The interface is divided into sections like "Planning" and "Design," with tasks such as "Kick-off meeting," "Budget approval," "Requirements," and "Design approval." Each task is labeled with its current status, start and due dates, assignee, last activity date, and priority level. The dashboard provides a clear overview of task progress and team responsibilities, highlighting efficient project tracking and collaboration tools.

Project management software for professional services can make or break your projects.

According to research by PwC, 77% of companies use project management software. Why? Because it’s linked to high-performing projects. So, if you want to take your agency project management to the next level, you’ll need to do the same.

But choosing the best option among the dozens of software solutions available (Capterra lists 339 under the PSA software category only!) can be tricky.

That’s why we’ve compiled this list of the best software for professional service teams.

List of Top Project Management Software for Professional Services

  • Productive – best all-in-one professional services software
  • Wrike – good option with resource planning features
  • ClickUp – solid work planning tool
  • Jira – popular tool for development
  • Notion – great knowledge management system
  • Trello – simple and user-friendly tool
  • Accelo – more complex option for agencies
  • Asana – streamlined PSA solution
  • Basecamp – another user-friendly pick
  • Toggl Track – great choice for timekeeping
  • Microsoft Project – solid option in the Microsoft ecosystem

Types of Software for Professional Services Teams

Here are five categories of software that cover various aspects of business management:

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)

ERP software for professional services offers an integrated approach to managing an organization’s resources, including finances, human resources, and customer satisfaction. These solutions help agencies make informed decisions based on consolidated data. Some top ERP features include resource allocation, financial forecasting, and project budgeting. To learn more, check out the best examples of ERP systems.

Professional Services Automation (PSA)

Like ERP solutions, PSA software integrates multiple capabilities into a single platform, including professional services project management, resourcing, time tracking, and invoicing, but the biggest difference is their industry focus. PSA focuses specifically on professional services workflows, while ERP supports industries such as retail, construction, healthcare, etc.

Time Tracking and Billing

Time tracking and billing software is more narrowly focused on managing billable hours and ensuring a stable cash flow. Some common features of professional services time tracking software include timers, online timesheet creation and approval, invoice generation, and payment monitoring. These features are crucial to ensuring projects are delivered within time and budget.

Time tracking and billing software is more narrowly focused on managing billable hours and ensuring a stable cash flow. Some common features of professional services time tracking software include timers, online timesheet creation and approval, invoice generation, and payment monitoring. These features are crucial to ensuring projects are delivered within time and budget.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management is another crucial part of an agency’s workflow. This includes managing prospective customers, winning deals, and sales team collaboration. While there are specialized CRM systems such as HubSpot, some software solutions offer embedded CRM capabilities for agencies. For example, Productive’s Sales CRM allows you to set up your sales pipeline, track communication, and analyze sales performance.

Reporting Tools

Reporting tools provide actionable insights into project performance, resource utilization, and financial health. Like CRM software, there are specialized solutions to get advanced data; however, reporting is usually embedded in project management tools (though it ranges from simple insights into time and task progress to more complex forecasting). Essential features include creating custom reports, visualizing your data, and sharing it among stakeholders.

Key Features of Project Management Tools

Your ideal software should have a mix of features described above. This ensures that your overall agency operations and workflows are supported for increased efficiency and productivity.

To summarize, these key features are:

  • Resource management to ensure staff and materials are allocated optimally
  • Project planning and workflow management to monitor project progress
  • Collaboration tools for sharing task updates and fostering team alignment
  • Automation features for reducing the effort spent on repetitive tasks
  • Budgeting and invoicing to manage cash flow and profitability
  • Real-time reporting to drive improvements and keep clients informed

Now, let’s head into a more in-depth comparison of the best project management tools for agencies:

1. Productive – Best All-in-One Platform for Your Professional Service Business

Productive is an all-in-one agency management software designed to cater to the workflows of professional service providers. This includes marketing, design, web development, and consulting agencies.

Productive’s most significant benefit is its unified platform with the core features necessary for successful project and business management. This reduces the time and cost needed to manage your processes across multiple tools and spreadsheets.

The fact that Productive is agency-focused means that the whole ecosystem fits together so that there are fewer tools we have to pull together in order to do what we need to do.

Orion Jensen,
CEO at Clear Launch

Let’s explore Productive’s features in more detail:

Project Management

Productive Project Management provides a high-level overview of your project planning, as well as granular task management.

First, users can get a comprehensive overview of their progress through seven customizable views. These include Gantt, Kanban, List, Calendar, Workload, and others. While some of these layouts provide a more visual perspective on tasks, others, like the Workload view, enhance functionality by including capacity indicators and employee availability, helping you better manage workloads across your team.

A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing a "Social Media Posts" board. The interface displays different task views like "List view," "Board view," "Calendar view," and "Table view." Tasks are categorized under "Not Started" and "Done" columns, each with labels such as "Agency," "High," and "Running an Agency." The tasks include topics like "Resource Planning: Prepare For Success," "Digital Agency Profitability - article," and "How to Better Facilitate Agency Client Communication." The software interface highlights task organization, status tracking, and easy navigation between different project views.


manage your project timelines with multiple layouts

With task management features, you can track time on tasks, create subtasks and to-dos, add dependencies, and update their status. You can also customize when and where you receive notifications and even create automatic workflows with Productive’s no-code Automations.

Time Tracking

Productive’s Time Tracking helps employees create time entries as efficiently as possible, and lets project managers approve and reject them individually or in bulk. Productive includes an integrated timer with a desktop widget, so you can control the timer without switching through tabs. There’s also an integration with Google Calendar, so you can turn your activities into time entries and associate them with services.

Budgeting

With Productive’s Budgeting, you can set and manage your agency rate cards, build proposals/quotes for potential clients, and then set up your budgets for won deals. Productive supports hourly, T&M, and retainer billing; you can also split budgets into separate phases to manage complex projects.

Monitor your budgeting in real time to ensure you’re on track. You can then switch to the Profitability view to check the relationship between your budget spend and profit margins. By scheduling your resources, you can view this data ahead of time with Forecasting.

A screenshot of project management software for professional services displaying a "Rebranding Campaign" progress chart. The image shows a bar graph with financial data over four weeks, including total budget, worked hours, and remaining hours. Below the chart, there's a detailed breakdown of time spent, budget allocation, and invoicing status, with $30,000 as the total budget, $10,000 invoiced, and $20,000 pending invoicing. The chart tracks project milestones and financials, helping manage resources and track progress efficiently.


Forecast your revenue and profit margins

With Budgeting and time tracking information, you can also generate invoices and control unpaid vs paid amounts in Productive.

Resource Planning

Besides enabling financial forecasting, Productive’s Resource Planning helps ensure that employees are scheduled optimally across tasks. By helping you visualize how utilized an employee is across a timeline (with capacity indicators), managers can more easily ensure that no one is overworked or left on the bench.

This also includes holidays and time off since Productive includes assigning, requesting, and approving time off.

A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing a detailed resource scheduling calendar for June 2023. The calendar displays tasks and bookings for team members Lucy Wu and Luke Peters, including project timelines, vacations, and personal time. Tasks are color-coded, with duration and hours per day indicated for each task. The layout emphasizes efficient resource management and scheduling for ongoing projects like "Pink Flamingos Rebranding & ADB Bank website," demonstrating the software's capability to track and allocate resources effectively within a professional services context.


Balance your team’s workload

With Productive, you can also visualize and forecast your employee utilization across different metrics, which provides insights into how productive your entire team is. Forecasting billable utilization helps you make better HRP decisions, such as hiring for overutilized roles or upskilling/reskilling underutilized team members.

Reporting

Productive’s Reporting collects data from various sources in Productive, including your time tracking, budgeting, employee scheduling, invoicing, and more. You can use one of the 50+ templates from Productive’s library or create your report entirely from scratch. Group data by different categories, pivot it by specific columns, visualize it as a Column, Line, Area, Bar, Donut, or Metric chart, and use custom fields to add agency-specific data.

A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing budget insights grouped by company. The insights include revenue and margin data for different projects like "ABC Company," "Cupcake Project," and "Website Redesign." The user has selected to group the data by "Company" with an option to add additional groups, and a checkbox to show only totals is enabled. The bar graph visually represents financial performance metrics, helping professional services manage budgets and project profitability effectively.


Use customizable templates to get real-time data

Users can also create custom dashboards, add different elements (including reports) with widgets, as well as share reports with automated sequences with Productive’s Pulse.

Additional Features

Additional features include:

  • Managing your sales cycle and analyzing performance with Sales CRM
  • Gathering information and creating documentation with Docs (and AI)
  • Creating custom permissions with the Permission Builder
  • Client Portal for easier collaboration and streamlined feedback

Integrations

Productive offers various integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration tools.

This includes Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook for scheduling and updates; Xero and QuickBooks for accounting; BambooHR and Breathe for HRM; Jira and Memtime for time tracking, and more.

Pricing

  • Plans start with the Essential plan at $9 per user per month, which includes essential features such as budgeting, project & task management, docs, time tracking, expense management, reporting, and time off management.
  • The Professional plan includes custom fields, recurring budgets, advanced reports, billable time approvals, and many more for $24 per user per month.
  • The Ultimate plan has everything that the Essential plan and Professional plan offer, along with the HubSpot integration, advanced forecasting, advanced custom fields, overhead calculations, and more for $32 per user per month.

You can also try a 14-day free trial before committing to a paid plan.

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2. Wrike

Wrike is a software solution that offers a variety of project management features for professional services management:

Key feautures:

  • Multiple project views
  • Integrated time tracking
  • Resource planning
  • Reporting
  • Essential budgeting


SOurce: wrike

While Wrike is a solid all-around choice, a notable downside is that budgeting is currently only available in the most advanced plan. In comparison, Productive offers a basic version of its budgeting, starting with the most affordable plan. Additionally, some reviews state that the reporting features could be more advanced.

Wrike, like any tool, has some limitations. One of them is the lack of report customization options. This can make it difficult to present data to the needs of the team or company.

Source: Capterra

To find out more details on how Wrike compares to other competitors, check out our Wrike vs Airtable article.

3. Jira

Jira is a project management and issue-tracking tool for agile, DevOps, and product teams.

Key features:

  • Kanban and Scrum boards
  • Sprints & backlogs
  • Velocity and burndown charts
  • Feature flagging tools
  • GitHub and Figma integration
A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing tasks organized into "To Do" and "In Progress" columns. The "To Do" section lists tasks like "Implement feedback collector" and "Add analytics events to pricing page," while the "In Progress" section includes tasks such as "Update T&C copy" and "Tech spike on new Stripe integration with PayPal." Each task is labeled with an identifier, priority level, and assignee, providing a clear visual overview of task management and progress tracking for professional services teams.


Source: jira

Jira is a popular software solution for web development and agile project management. While it can be suitable for other types of projects, many of Jira’s features are oriented towards development, so you might not be able to get the most out of it if you’re working in a marketing or consulting firm. Check out our Asana vs Jira vs Trello article for more information.

Basically, Jira’s great for creating, organizing and assigning tasks and “time-boxing” them. It’s not great for waterfall and doesn’t get into things like work breakdowns and Gantt charts.

Source: Reddit

4. ClickUp

ClickUp is a workload management software for enterprises, startups, non-profits, education companies, and agencies.

Key features:

  • Multiple project views
  • Agile management
  • Private dashboards
  • Time tracking
  • Workload view
A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing a task list for a "Release Project." The interface is divided into sections labeled "Issues Found" and "Review." Tasks such as "Update contractor agreement" and "Budget assessment" are assigned to team members, with details including due dates, stages (e.g., Initiation, Planning, Execution), and priority levels. Each task also displays icons indicating tracked time and other relevant details, providing a clear overview of project management activities tailored for professional services.


source: CLICKUP

ClickUp has good customization and flexibility, and is also suitable for development companies with its sprint management and GitHub integration. However, you might want to consider Jira as  a specialized ClickUp alternative for web development or Productive for all-in-one agency management. Additionally, ClickUp has some performance and usability issues.

The improvement points for ClickUp are still related to performance, as even after the update to version 3.0, I still encounter issues and instabilities.

Source: G2

5. Notion

Notion is a knowledge management and documentation system with advanced features for handling data.

key features:

  • Pages and wikis
  • Data syncing
  • AI features
  • Simple tasks and collaboration
  • Notion Calendar


source: notion

Notion can be a great tool for managing your information and processing complex data, but it isn’t suitable for comprehensive client management. There are some task management and collaboration features, but you won’t find resource allocation, time tracking, or budgeting here.

The most unique feature of Notion is the database. So, Notion will help you if you need to see a list of items with various characteristics, and it will be especially helpful if you want to arrange and rearrange that information in different ways.

Source: Reddit

For more information on knowledge management systems, check out our comparison between Obsidian and Notion.

6. Trello

Trello is a user-friendly software known for its Kanban and card-based task management system.

Key features:

  • Task cards
  • Additional project views: Timeline, Calendar, Table
  • Project-specific data
  • Project templates
  • Third-party integrations and powerups


source: trello

Trello can be a great starter tool for smaller agencies. However, most businesses will need to transition to more complex solutions as they grow. Integrated time tracking, budgeting, and billing are some key features that you’ll be missing out on.

When we started out, we decided to go with Trello, and it was a solid tool. Back then it didn’t have many advanced features, but it worked for us for a while. Once we got things rolling at the company, we realized that not having the ability to track time or build budgets was an issue for us.

ALEX STRELTSOV,
GENERAL MANAGER AT PROLEX MEDIA

7. Accelo

Accelo is an enterprise project management software solution for managing client projects and promoting team alignment.

Key features:

  • Project planning
  • Task lists
  • Invoicing
  • Sales
  • Reporting
A screenshot of project management software for professional services displaying a quick report summary. The report shows a table listing different types of support tasks such as "New Support," "DKIM Authentication," "Custom Scripts," and "Data Restore." The columns provide details on the count, frequency (weekly), average age (in days), and average time spent on each task. The date range for the report is from 30 August 2021 to 28 September 2021. The interface allows filtering by Type, Manager, Status, Class, and Priority.


source: accelo

Accelo is a solid tool with many useful features, but users mention that getting used to Accelo can be daunting due to its complexity and unintuitive technology. Some users also believe that the user interface could be easier to use.

This software was built a long time ago and has not been modernized to the extent it should have. Many modern User Experience functions are not included.

Source: G2

Check out some more modern Accelo alternatives here.

8. Asana

Asana is a streamlined professional services automation software solution.

Key features:

  • Multiple project views
  • Integrated time tracking
  • Personal dashboard
  • Templates library
  • Workload chart
A screenshot of project management software for professional services displaying a Gantt chart for a "New Product Launch" project. The chart visualizes tasks for the Sales and Marketing teams, with timelines spanning February and March. The right panel shows Gantt options, including "Highlight Critical Path," "Auto-schedule Tasks," and "Compare Baseline," with the baseline set to 03/01/23. The interface includes various task management features, such as sorting and filtering options.


source: asana

Asana is a middle-of-the-road option; it’s not as simple to use as Trello,and it lacks the comprehensiveness of solutions such as Productive (advanced reporting and financing). It’s a solid choice, but you’ll need to consider some more robust Asana alternatives at one point.

9. Basecamp

Basecamp is a simple project management app for small teams.

Key features:

  • Single dashboard
  • File management
  • Task tracking
  • Project templates


source: basecamp

Basecamp is similar to Trello, and to an extent Asana, as it’s a simple project management tool. It doesn’t get into agency finances, but it can be a good starting point for inexperienced teams. Keep in mind that unlike Trello or Asana, Basecamp doesn’t offer a free version of its software.

10. Toggl Track

Toggl Track is a timekeeping software for creative agencies, consultants, law firms, and more.

Key features:

  • Automated time tracking
  • Invoicing
  • Timer
  • Timesheets report
  • Integrations with third-party software
A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing a weekly report of time tracking data. The bar chart visualizes billable and non-billable hours for each day of the week. Below the chart, time entries are grouped by project with details on duration, amount, and percentage. A pie chart on the right displays the distribution of total clocked hours, with sections representing different categories of work. The report can be downloaded in PDF, CSV, or Excel formats.


source: Toggl Track

Toggl Track is a streamlined and easy-to-use time-tracking software. The more advanced plans also provide project cost management features, and there’s a QuickBooks integration for invoicing. While Toggl Track can be a great option, especially if you’re using the free version, there are tools that will offer more features at a comparable price.

11. Microsoft Project

Microsoft Project is a project management software solution in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Key features:

  • Team collaboration
  • Dynamic scheduling
  • Business intelligence
  • Integrates with Microsoft Teams
A screenshot of project management software for professional services showing an overview of work tasks. The top section displays a summary of 13 projects, 43 tasks, 10 completed tasks, and 29 future tasks. Below, two charts are shown: a donut chart on the left visualizing tasks by status (overdue, completed, and future), and a pie chart on the right categorizing tasks by project and bucket, with segments labeled by task types like surveys, email campaigns, and employee benefits.


source: mi rosoft project

Users often report that they enjoy using Microsoft Project for construction projects and that it has solid features that support more complex projects. However, it also feels dated compared to other solutions, and there are some issues with exporting and sharing your workspace with other users.

You can also check out our list of the best ERP for service companies.

Benefits of Using a Project Management Tool

According to research by Capterra, the benefits of using project management software in your professional services organization include:

  • Improved timeline estimation (60%)
  • Most effective use of project resources (55%)
  • Enhanced team communication (49%)
  • Improved budget estimation (48%)
  • More accurate metrics (38%)

This data highlights why project management software is essential to ensuring that a professional services firm can stay competitive and successful. Investing in the right tool can help your business become more cost efficient, increase employee engagement and satisfaction, and foster long-term relationships with clients.

How to Choose Your Best Project Management Tool

We’ve reviewed a range of solutions for project management. To find your best option, consider features, pricing, and additional criteria such as usability, scalability, and customer support

To summarize: Trello or Basecamp can be a good streamlined option, and Jira and Notion are more specialized solutions for specific needs. Toggl Track is great for timekeeping.

However, for comprehensive project and agency management, Productive is your best choice. It supports your business with financial and resource planning and robust analytics and forecasting.

Book a demo with Productive today to learn how it can support your agency’s growth.

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Lucija Bakić

Content Specialist

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